Oh Khrushchev, My Khrushchev

The six stories in OH KHRUSHCHEV, MY KHRUSHCHEV, all previously published in literary magazines from 1978 to 1994, feature baby boomers growing up in the shadow of the Cold War from the Eisenhower era of the 1950s into full yuppiehood during the Reagan revolution of the 1980s and beyond. One boy's crush on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, junior high recitations of the poem "Invictus," the reaction of Columbia University students to the 1970 Kent State killings, suicide attempts both failed and successful, endless protest marches, a woman's struggle with computer programming on an old Apple IIc, discreet banks in the Cayman Islands, monthly condo board meetings, screenwriters in the Hollywood Hills, and federal bankruptcy court in the district of Southern Florida -- all of this and more are craftily delineated and diagrammed in Richard Grayson's playful portraits of an American generation coping with constant change.